During the show listeners were invited to report the names they had for grandparents, so here's my data point:
My mother's parents were "Grandma" and "Grandpa". Because we saw them less often, my father's parents were qualified as "Grandma Mary" and "Grandpa Wally".
The oddity comes when you jump beyond that in any direction. My great-grandmother was "Granny", not entirely due to her similarity in personality and bearing to the character from "The Beverly Hillbillies". It was many years before I realized that other people called their grandmothers by that term. Living with Granny (across the street from us) was Grandma's older sister (my great aunt), variously called "Granny Jo" or "Georgie".
Great aunts and great uncles on all sides were simply "Aunt So-and-so" and "Uncle So-and-so"; both my mother and father were an only child (I've never come up with a good way of pluralizing that expression) so we had no actual "Aunt" or "Uncle". My cousin-once-removed (Georgie's daughter) was called "Aunt Alice" because she was closer to the age of my grandmother's younger sister, and it didn't seem right to call someone that much older "Cousin".
When my daughter (the first grandchild) was first learning to speak, she called my mother "Ama." That quickly turned to "Ada" and that version stuck. My father is Pop Pop. All of my parents' grandchildren call them Ada & Pop Pop. My husband's mother, being Dutch, is "Oma."
As for my great-aunts and great-uncles, they were always just plain "Aunt" and "Uncle."
Ron Draney said:
During the show listeners were invited to report the names they had for grandparents, so here's my data point:
My mother's parents were "Grandma" and "Grandpa". Because we saw them less often, my father's parents were qualified as "Grandma Mary" and "Grandpa Wally".
Maybe this is regional (Wisconsin), or maybe it was just careless pronunciation, but we always dropped the "d" and just said "Gramma" and "Grampa." But that was on my mother's side, and we were very close to them … lived in their upstairs apartment in fact.
But for my dad's side, it was always "Gramma Heim" and "Grampa Heim" perhaps to just distinguish them form the other "Gramma" and "Grampa."
All my aunts and uncles, regardless of generation, were just that. Aunt (first name) and Uncle (first name).
I remember reading in Newsweek a long time ago an article about an up an coming Russian politician who was considered in Russia to be "a piano in the shrubbery". It means someone not totally trustworthy, or shady, I guess. I think it's hilarious.
Ron Draney said:
both my mother and father were an only child (I've never come up with a good way of pluralizing that expression)
I've had the same problem, and have at times said "only children," but we all know how that ends up. Sometimes I've said they were "onlies," which gets it across, but I don't like it. "Neither of my parents had siblings" has become my standard, and if it makes people think I'm a verbal showoff, so be it.
Both of my grandmothers were twice widowed by the time I was born, so I never addressed my grandfathers. My father's mother was Grandma or, probably more accurately, Gramma. My mother's mother wanted nothing to do with anything that implied her age, so she was always Lucy. I have recently become a grandfather myself, and it looks as if I will be Grandpa, or Grampa. My wife, Laura, who in college was known as Llama (pronounced lama) will be Llauma, which she has now adopted as her business name for selling jewelry and other craft-work.
Peter